Playboy.com's WWE Diva Week: Christy Hemme

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In 2005, WWE Diva Christy Hemme graced the pages of Playboy as the fifth WWE Diva to pose nude for the magazine. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of WWE Raw, we’re bringing back the famous pictorial and interview, along with the many other WWE Divas who have posed through the years. Read Christy’s interview and see the pics below or check out WWE’s other Diva’s Chyna and Torrie Wilson here.

At 24
Christy Hemme has played every kind of fantasy girl the male mind can conjure:
cheerleader, music video dancer, Hoot­ers waitress on — yes! — roller skates,
pudding wrestler, giggling Juggy girl on The Man Show. And now, to complete the
resume, Hemme steps into her Latest role as the WWE’s newest RAW Diva, having
beaten out nine other beauties in a grueling competi­tion finally settled by
the fans.

Hemme jumped
into the contest in her usual way: high-octane. “I don’t do things unless
I go full-on,” she says. For the Diva Dodgeball challenge, for instance,
she overcame a sprained ankle to crush one competitor. For the cream pie
fiesta, she zestily clapped one onto her bikinied tush and strutted around the
ring as the audience went bonkers.

But Hemme
is no diva. She’s talkative and friendly and has a boisterous laugh. She’s the
type of girl who is close to her family and signs autographs for hours after
wrestling matches because “it makes me happy when I make someone else
happy.” Today, as she lounges in the WWE’s sleek New York City office,
she’s making the cubicle dwellers happy in a clingy black sweater, pin­striped
pants and a checked newsboy cap. “Normally I’d be wearing jeans,” she
says, stretching out her five-foot-five frame, “But for the WWE we have to
dress in business casual everywhere we go.” Her trademark fiery red hair
spills lux­uriously down her back. “And yes. this hair is all real,” she
says with a laugh. "Guys come up behind me all the time and put their
hands on it, and it’s like­ – smack! — ‘That’s mine!’” On her right wrist is a
tattoo of a little red heart, in honor of her late mom. "I love hearts,
and my favorite color is red,” she says, “In my bedroom I have all
kinds of hearts everywhere.”

Hemme is
constantly in motion, leaping up to make a point, gesturing with her hands,
unleashing that rowdy laugh. This is a woman who likes to have fun. “I’ve
always had this energy,” she says, “Always. I mean. I drove my
parents crazy growing up. I have so much energy, I can’t sleep much. I just
wake up and think, Okay, I’ve got a lot of stuff to do.” It’s no surprise
that this free- spirited California girl is adept at seemingly every sport in
the Western world: snowboarding. Capoeira (a Brazilian martial art), skiing,
dirt biking, wake- boarding. “Anything that’s active and crazy,” she
says, “I can ride a horse, too.”

At the moment, she’s in motion without a special
someone. “I don’t have a boyfriend,” she says, “But I am a
girlfriend kind of girl. I’m not a dater. I don’t want to put my energy into
meaningless dates with people I’m not going to be serious with.” She
smiles wistfully. “I’d like to meet somebody and give them all my
love,” she says, “But with what I’m doing right now, it’s obviously
dif­ficult.” Indeed, Hemme works 51 weeks a year. She travels every week
from Los Angeles for three nights of wrestling matches in various parts of the
coun­try, then hustles over to her RAW gig, which is shown live on Spike TV every
Monday night. Then it’s back to the West Coast for a few errands, and the whole
process starts anew.

Read the rest of the interview on Page 2

Hemme says
she isn’t attracted to a particular type of man. “If you look at the
people in my past,” she says, “they are all completely different. But
one quality I see in all of them is that they were all very passionate. I’m
most attracted to a man who cares about the things he likes to do, who relishes
what he does day to day.” Her head is also turned by physical quirks.
“I don’t want a perfect guy,” she says, “What’s hot to me are
interesting things like a scar on a man’s face or a crooked tooth. Weird, kooky
things.”

The ability
to ride a motorcycle is also a plus. Mention the words Harley-Davidson and
Hemme lights up. Her father taught her to ride when she was three. “I
would be thinking, This is really scary, but I’m going to do it,” she recalls.
“I would never tell him I was scared. And I loved it.” Her dad also taught
her to be independent, a lesson she absorbed so well that she moved out of her
folks’ house in Temecula, California at 17. She and three other girls took an
apartment near her fam­ily. “We just went crazy,” she says, “We were
loud and had parties and had a really fun time.“ She subsidized this fun by
working at her father’s insurance company until she decided she wanted to be a
Hooters girl.

“When I first
got to Hooters thought, This is fun, but how can I make this more fun?”
she says. Then she remembered seeing old photographs of Hooters babes wearing
roller skates. Management balked when she pro­posed the idea, because each
waitress had to buss her own tables and haul tubs up and down a staircase.
“I was like ‘Screw you. I’m wearing my roller skates!’” she says.
“I always had this strange fetish about being Rollergirl.” After
signing a waiver, the determined Hemme won her right to haul dirty dishes down
stairs on skates. “I got really good at it,” she says.

One night at
a bar, in what sounds like the beginning of an excellent adult film, Hemme met
a group of former professional cheerleaders. They told her they were getting
ready to attend the annual biker rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. "I was
like, ‘Yes!” she says, “I love Harley rallies.” They left the
next day. “All we did was pudding wrestle and sell photos of the
girls,” she says, “and I ended up making best friends.” The gang
decided to form a dance troupe called Perfect Angels and started performing at
every Harley rally they could find. “We’d just show up and say, 'Can we
work here?’” Who would refuse them?

After five
years of that, Hemme tried out to be a Juggy dancer on Comedy Central’s The Man
Show. “I auditioned by jumping on a
trampoline in my bikini,” she
says with a giggle. Twice she was rejected, but the third year she returned to her roots: “When I dyed my hair
red, everything started clicking.”

She stands up to do a catlike stretch. We decide to take a walk around New York City to continue our conversation. In the elevator she recounts how, after a year spent Juggying, she began thinking of
becoming a WWE Diva. “I had been a big fan of the WWE when I was a
kid,” she says, strolling down a midtown
side­walk. "Undertaker was my favorite.” A friend in the
wrestling industry discour­aged her, saying
she was too small. “I was disappointed, because the WWE is so
me,” she says.

When the
Diva search started last sum­mer, she wangled an audition. She felt right at home — the crowds weren’t so dif­ferent from those in Sturgis. “I really
get along with bikers,” she says
as a businessman passes her on the sidewalk
and does a comical triple take. “I know how to talk to them, and
we party together at night. The WWE audience is the same.”

Hemme leaped
right into the Diva Search, and the audience quickly got behind its red-haired
California spark plug. The only part of the competition that bothered her was
the backbiting among the contestants, both on- and off­stage. “I’m used to
being in a group of girls where everybody gets along. I’m not used to being
mean and vindictive,” she says. "But now we’re all friends.” Hmm. really?
"Really!” she says. “We talk all the time.”

When Hemme aced
the contest last September (earning a one-year contract and $250,000), she was
ecstatic. "Literally the next day I flew to Cancun to do a Divas photo
shoot,” she says. "I absolutely love doing sexy photo shoots.” The thrill has
yet to wear off. "Do you have any idea how exciting the show is?” she
says as a couple passes her. The man stares, mouth agape, while his scowling
girlfriend elbows him. “It’s live, so it’s mayhem backstage. And then in
the Diva locker room it’s so great. If a guy could be a fly on the wall he
would be so happy, because all the girls are running around naked.”

Since her
victory Hemme’s schedule has been frenetic (peaking with WrestleMania 21 on April
3), but she did pause long enough to spend a bit of her prize money. “I
bought a Harley: she says proudly. "I got a Dyna Low Rider, which is a big
bike. Chrome everything, custom everything. I was like,‘I want a bigger engine.
I want it to be heavier, and I want to go faster!” She laughs delightedly.
“I love to go fast.” she says. “Big surprise. right?“